Trust Helping Social Innovation in Northern Irelands Third Sector
RSM McClure Watters and The Young Foundation, supported by The Building Change Trust are facilitating a series of information seminars and workshops on social innovation and would like to invite charities, as well as Community and Voluntary organisations to attend.
Two workshops are being held in Belfast, at the E3 Centre on the Springfield Road, with additional workshops being hosted in Cookstown at the Rural Community Network and Derry-Londonderry at the Ebrington Barracks.
The first Belfast workshop will look at the subject of Social Innovation in the Health Sector on Tuesday 20th November and the second will consider Social Innovation in the area of Food and Food Production on Thursday 22nd November.
Derry-Londonderry’s workshop will look at the role of social innovation in the arts and culture sector and Cookstown’s will discuss social innovation in a rural setting.
All these workshops will consider what social innovation means for Northern Ireland’s Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) and what it means to be innovative in commissioning, designing and delivering services to the community at large.
Throughout the workshops, The Young Foundation will look at social innovation in a national and international setting and RSM McClure Watters will address the context for innovation in NI and consider why the sector needs to innovate in order to thrive in an increasingly difficult economic climate.
Local organisations will ‘show and tell’ on how they are innovating, in designing new services, sustaining their organisations and impacting upon the needs of their users.
Charlie Fisher, Building Change Trust Coordinator, said: “The workshops will inform the debate around social innovation and encourage those in attendance to positively examine your work practice, motivating you to looking afresh at how creative thinking and new ways of working evolve within your organisation.
“Designed to be highly interactive, the workshops will introduce new tools and problem resolve exercises, promoting innovation in programme design that facilitates the emergence of exciting solutions to meet the needs of our communities across Northern Ireland.
“The Trust needs to understand the sector’s awareness of social innovation and to stay informed of what more can be done to support and promote innovation across the Community and Voluntary Sector in Northern Ireland”.